Stratford Astronomy Group

Fifteen members attended Tuesday evening’s meeting at St. Michael’s Catholic Secondary School. Chair Patrick Hayes reported a club account balance of $1,448 as of October. 

Patrick is arranging another Star Party Night with the Stratford-Perth Museum, tentatively set for Thursday, January 7, 2027. Details will follow at the December meeting. 

SHOW-AND-TELL – HARDWARE ISSUES 

Mike Hicks brought an 80mm refractor with a finder scope problem that Dr. Michael Burns helped resolve. Ken Roberts brought the Astroscan wide-field reflector he had presented at the October meeting. 

Mike Hicks helped stabilize the Astroscan’s eyepiece with a metal ring made by a friend using a 3-D printer. The faulty eyepiece holder still needs replacing. Ken is arranging repairs so the telescope can be used at future star parties. 

A member new to sky viewing brought an older  Newtonian reflector on a German equatorial mount (GEM) and tripod, hoping to get it working. Dr. Burns explained that this telescope has two main systems: the optical tube, which forms the image, and the mount, which points the tube and tracks the sky. 

In a Newtonian, the primary mirror at the back of the tube gathers light and reflects it forward to a small flat secondary mirror, which directs it to the focuser on the side of the tube. The distance from the primary mirror to the focal point is the focal length. The focuser holds an eyepiece, which magnifies the image. Magnification is the telescope’s focal length divided by the eyepiece’s: a 900 mm scope with a 10 mm eyepiece gives 90x. A finder scope, a small wide-field scope on the tube, helps you locate targets once it’s aligned with the main scope. 

Because Earth rotates, stars drift across the field. An up/down, left/right mount needs adjustments on both axes to keep an object centred. An equatorial mount tilts one axis (the RA axis) to point at the pole, so following a star needs only one motion. The tripod provides stability, and the latitude and azimuth adjustments aim the RA axis at the pole. 

Setup, as Dr. Burns outlined it: 

• Level the tripod. 

• Set the mount’s latitude scale to your latitude. 

• Roughly align the RA axis with the north celestial pole using a compass and Polaris. If you cannot see Polaris, ensure that the RA axis is roughly aligned north to 45 degrees. 

• Balance the scope on both axes with the counterweights. 

• Find and centre your target. 

• Turn the RA slow-motion knob by hand to keep it centred. 

Before using it at night, practice in daylight: sight a distant object in the finder scope and align the telescope eyepiece view to match the finder scope view.  This will help with nighttime setup.

THE ROCHE LIMIT – ORBITING MOONS 

Bruce Simpson opened his talk with an early-evening image of a faint object low in the sky and asked members to identify it. Some guessed Venus or Jupiter. A second image revealed another object orbiting the first. 

Bruce revealed that the Mars Land Rover had photographed Earth and the Moon. 

Bruce explained the Roche limit: the distance from a planet inside which tidal forces can pull apart an orbiting body held together only by its own gravity. It’s named for mathematician and astronomer Édouard Roche, who worked it out in 1848. 

Bruce hinted that the Roche Limit could help explain Saturn’s rings. 

He will continue his talk at the December 1 meeting.   

COOL COSMOLOGY NEWS / WHAT’S UP IN NOVEMBER NIGHT SKY

Dr. Burns presented November’s Cool Cosmology News. 

Click here to view Cool Cosmology News, November 2026, with nightly Moon phases and a “What’s Up” guide to the night sky. Each day on the November calendar links to more information. 

Time ran out before Dr. Burns could present “Boundaries – 2nd Try,” exploring whether the universe has boundaries. He will continue the talk at future meetings. 

 

Tom Kimber – News 

Seventeen members attended Tuesday evening’s meeting at St. Michael’s Catholic Secondary School. Patrick Hayes chaired the meeting and reported that, as of September, the club has a balance of $1,448 in its account.

Patrick is working to partner with the Stratford-Perth Museum again for a Star Party Night in January 2027. Details will follow at the November and December meetings.

TELESCOPE EQUIPMENT STORAGE

Jim and Minne Koteles have kindly agreed to store the club’s 8-inch Dobsonian telescope and stand on their property for the winter. The yellow eyepiece case and eyepieces are stored there too. The Koteles have hosted SOG viewing parties from their expansive backyard close to Wildwood Conservation Area and hope to do so again.

SHOW-AND-TELL

Patrick brought astronomy binoculars mounted on a tripod. A member asked why one might use such a set-up for night sky viewing. The main advantage is the wide field of view; the entire Pleiades can be seen at once. The only drawback is the difficulty of keeping the binoculars stable. Patrick admitted that his binoculars were old. A club member pointed out that current state-of-the-art binoculars have excellent self-stabilizing features, but you pay for them. (Click here for more information on self-stabilizing binoculars.)

Ken Roberts also brought his Astroscan, a small, wide-field reflecting telescope made by Edmund Scientific and first sold in the late 1970s. Because of its size and portability, it was the “original grab-and-go” telescope. (Click here to see more on the Astroscan.)

The Astroscan is shaped like a short, stubby tube with a round base, and it looks a little like a red ball sitting on a stand. It does not use a tripod: you set it on a table or on the ground and point it by hand. It is a 4.25-inch (about 108 mm) f/4 Newtonian reflector with a focal length of 17 inches, which provides low magnification and a wide field of view.

Ken is having a problem keeping the 1.25-inch eyepiece stable when the telescope is moved about. One club member offered him advice on how to steady it.

COOL COSMOLOGY NEWS

Dr. Michael Burns presented Cool Cosmology News for October to the members. The beautiful Hunter’s Full Moon and the Celestial Triangle will be visible on October 26.

Click here to view the full Cool Cosmology News, October 2026. It includes the Moon phases for each night and a “What’s Up” guide to the night sky. The links on each day of the October calendar are active and lead to more information.

See the last slide in Cool Cosmology News. Michael Burns presented a talk entitled “Boundaries – 2nd Try” to address the question: Does the universe have boundaries?

The observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. That’s larger than you might expect given the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old, since space itself has been expanding the whole time. Light from the most distant things we can see has been travelling for 13.8 billion years, but those objects have since been carried much farther away, to roughly 46 billion light-years from us in every direction.

That figure describes the observable universe, not the whole thing. It’s a horizon set by how far light has had time to reach us, not an edge. An observer in a distant galaxy would have their own observable bubble, centred on them and overlapping with ours.

Does the universe have a boundary? As far as we can tell, no, says Dr. Burns. There’s no wall or edge out there, and the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion at a point in space; it was the expansion of space everywhere at once. Two main possibilities remain open:

The universe is infinite: space goes on forever, with no edge.

The universe is finite but unbounded: space curves back on itself, a bit like the surface of a sphere. The surface of a ball has a finite area but no edge, and you can travel forever without reaching a boundary. A 3D version of this would mean that travelling far enough in a straight line could eventually bring you back to where you started.

Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (from satellites like Planck) show space is very close to “flat,” meaning no detectable curvature. That’s consistent with an infinite universe, but it doesn’t prove it, because a finite universe that is simply much bigger than our observable patch would also look flat to us.

Dr. Burns’s presentations have a style all their own. His colourful PowerPoint slides feature a small Albert Einstein-like character who poses questions throughout the talk, a refreshing approach that keeps the audience engaged.

Time did not allow him to finish his talk on the boundaries of the universe, so he will continue it at a future meeting.

Tom Kimber – News

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Three meteor showers arrive in November with the Moon mostly out of the way – ideal for casual late-night viewing. Click here for details from Cosmic Pursuits.

Tom Kimber – News

 

Launched by NASA on August 12, 2018, the Parker Solar Probe’s primary mission is to study the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, from within to answer long-standing questions about how our star works.

Because Earth’s orbit is far from the Sun, the probe launched from Earth carries sideways orbital speed. To fall close to the Sun, the probe must shed angular momentum. The probe was launched on a trajectory to use a series of Venus flybys to shed excess orbital energy. Seven Venus flybys, spaced over seven years, have positioned Parker to make its closest approach to the Sun in 2024. It now orbits the Sun every 88 days.

The probe’s remarkable heat shield keeps it in shadow, and space itself carries very little heat. The Sun’s corona is millions of degrees, but because it is so rarefied, few particles hit the probe’s heat shield, so it transfers little heat.

For a more in-depth look at how this works, see this video produced by NASA.

Tom Kimber – News

 

 

Michael Burns presented his Cool Cosmology News to the members. The Fall Equinox occurs on September 22. 

Click here to view the full Cool Cosmology News, Sept 2026, which includes the Moon phases for each night and What’s Up in the night sky. 

The links in each day of the Sept calendar are active. They will take you to more information about night sky events.

Here is a summary of the important points that Michael made:

Discover the exciting launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a milestone that showcases our collective interest in space exploration and should inspire pride in our community. 

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30, heading for the L2 Lagrange point roughly 1.5 million km from Earth. Its Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel camera with a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s, capable of measuring light from a billion galaxies. A Coronagraph Instrument will block starlight to image faint exoplanets directly. Roman’s science goals include probing dark energy and dark matter and completing a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy. 

The Webb’s clearest-ever image of the Lion Nebula offers a breathtaking glimpse into the universe’s beauty, encouraging awe and curiosity among members. 

The James Webb Space Telescope has produced its sharpest view yet of the Lion Nebula (NGC 2392), about 6,500 light-years away in Gemini. Unlike massive stars that end their lives in supernovae, lower-mass stars like this one’s progenitor exhaust their hydrogen and helium, pulsate, and shed their outer layers — leaving behind a white dwarf surrounded by a shell of gas and dust (a major source of the universe’s observable dust). The nebula spans roughly 250–260 light-years across. 

“Black Hole Star” — A New Type of Astrophysical Object 

MIT-led astronomers using JWST have spotted an extremely bright red object in the early universe, appearing just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Roughly the size of our solar system, it puts out 100 billion times more energy than any known star could produce — output closer to what a black hole generates. In a paper published in Nature, the team concludes it’s likely a dense gas cloud powered by a central black hole rather than nuclear fusion, an entirely new class of object they’re calling a “black hole star.” 

Latest Amateur Equipment News 

Here are two YouTube videos you might consider if you’re interested in buying a smart telescope soon.

This one compares the S30 Pro to the S50 Pro.

This one compares the S50 Pro to the Dwarf Draco.

Seestar S50 Pro — $1,300–$1,400, available now 

ZWO’s new smart telescope features an 8.3 MP telephoto/wide-angle dual camera, 50 mm aperture with a 260 mm focal length, a 4-element apochromatic lens, Milky Way and star-trail imaging support, a 10,000 mAh battery (9-hour runtime), and 128 GB of onboard storage. 

Dwarf Draco — $2,000–$2,300, available November 

Dwarflab’s upcoming smart scope comes in OSC and SHO versions, with a larger 90 mm aperture and 340 mm focal length (f/3.8). It adds active sensor cooling, a built-in guide scope with real-time guiding corrections, and a rotating CMOS for field-rotation compensation — notable upgrades over the Seestar S50 Pro’s fixed sensor and standard tracking. 

]— Michael Burns.

News – Tom Kimber

Patrick Hayes chaired this first monthly meeting for the 2026-2027 season. The meeting room at St Michaels Catholic Secondary School (classroom 102) had 14 attendees ready for presentations by Ken Roberts and Michael Burns.

Ken presented his study of M13, known as the Great Hercules Cluster. It is a globular cluster in the Hercules constellation, one of the brightest and best-known in the northern sky.

As Ken pointed out, M13 is a naked-eye (barely)  target in the northern sky, which makes it approachable for hands-on observational work.

Ken’s presentation is very detailed. You can view it here

Globular clusters are some of the oldest, well-structured objects in the cosmos.  They are near enough to Earth to be observed in detail. In principle, globular clusters are dense, roughly spherical collections of stars, tightly bound by gravity, that orbit a galaxy’s core.

M13 fits that profile well: it packs several hundred thousand stars into a ball a few hundred light-years across, sitting about 22,000-25,000 light-years away in the constellation Hercules.

The stars are old — mostly ancient, “Population II” stars, some over 11 billion years old — which is typical of globulars, in contrast to open clusters (like the Pleiades), which are younger, looser groupings of stars found in a galaxy’s disk.

M13 is visible to the naked eye under dark skies as a faint smudge, and it’s a popular target for binoculars and small telescopes — through a decent-sized scope, you can start to resolve individual stars near its edges.

M13 is approximately 11-12 billion years old, making it one of the oldest objects in our Milky Way. This means it formed early in the galaxy’s history, only a few billion years after the Big Bang.

Ken stressed that globular clusters are known as pulsar factories. In a dense globular cluster, old neutron stars can undergo close stellar encounters or capture a binary companion. Matter accreting from that companion spins the neutron star up to millisecond rotation periods — a process called “recycling.” That’s why cluster pulsars are almost always millisecond pulsars rather than the young, slow pulsars you find in supernova remnants. But the Hercules Cluster has a modest number of 5-millisecond pulsars, says Ken.

He closed his presentation by noting that M13 and other clusters offer budding scientists in many different disciplines, ranging from astronomy and physics to chemistry and biology to computing and artificial intelligence, many opportunities for exploration and analysis.

Michael Burns followed Ken and presented his Cool Comic Observations for September. Michael also delivered a high-level discussion on new smart telescopes, the ZWO Seestar S50 Pro and the DwarfLab Dwarf.

Stay tuned. More will be posted regarding Michael Burn’s presentations.

The next club meeting is Tuesday, October 6,  at 7:00 pm.

Tom Kimber – News

 

 

 

 

Dr. Michael Burns presented his Cool Space/Cosmology/Astrophysics News for June. 

Click here for a review of the June 2 meeting. As well, see the Agenda with notes.

The next meeting at St. Michael’s High School is in September, set for 7:00 pm  on September 15.

Tom Kimber – News

 

In 2019, the first picture of a Black Hole was published. Now, astronomers are developing a video of the same Black Hole located at the center of M87. Journalist Catherine  Zhu writes about it in the CBC. You can read her fascinating story here and also listen to a Quirks and Quarks program on the background of this project.

SAG’s own Dr. Michael Burns has been involved in this Event Horizon Telescope (EVT) project.

Tom Kimber – News

 

That bright object visible in the west in the night sky after sunset is Venus.

Click here for details of the night sky.

Tom Kimber -News

 

The Stratford Astronomy Group (SAG) drew 47 people to a Star Party at the Stratford-Perth Museum on Thursday evening, May 27,  where attendees took in astronomy presentations and later viewed the night sky through a range of telescopes. Hosted by Kelly and the museum staff, the event brought together experienced observers and first-time skywatchers for an evening of learning and hands-on discovery.

The evening began indoors with three engaging presentations from SAG members, each offering a different window into astronomy, before attendees moved outside for an observing session behind the museum.

Denis Desmeules opened the program with an accessible look at how the sky changes through the day and across the seasons. He explained the Sun’s path, shifting shadows, and how Earth’s orbit changes what we see overhead throughout the year. With a May 2026 sky map, he also gave attendees a practical guide to what they could expect to spot that night and in the days ahead.

 

Patrick Hayes followed with a compelling tour of the universe’s hidden side, covering black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. Moving from the collapse of massive stars to the expansion of the universe itself, he highlighted a striking truth: everything we can see is only a small fraction of what exists.

Bruce Simpson wrapped up the indoor program with practical skywatching tips, using the Big Dipper to show how to find Polaris, bright stars, and other celestial landmarks. His presentation connected familiar patterns in the night sky to the larger skill of navigating and understanding what appears overhead.

After the talks, attendees headed outside to a lineup of Dobsonian reflectors, refractors, and SeeStar S50 smart telescopes, where the evening’s ideas quickly became real views of the sky.

The mix of traditional eyepiece viewing and live digital imaging gave visitors two very different ways to experience the sky. Some enjoyed the direct connection of looking through a telescope, while others were drawn to the colour-enhanced images building in real time on digital screens. Together, the instruments sparked conversation, curiosity, and plenty of excitement.

By night’s end, the Star Party had done exactly what it set out to do: bring people closer to the sky, deepen their understanding of what they were seeing, and leave them eager for the next chance to look up.

Below are links to each presentation. 

The Night Sky – Denis

The Invisible  Cosmos – Patrick

Navigating Constellations – Bruce

We observed Jupiter and 4 of its moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Almost a full Moon as well, big and swelling in the eyepieces. On May 31, we will witness a once-in-a-blue-moon event. When a full Moon appears twice in the same calendar month. Appropriate for our Star Party. 

Tom Kimber – News